01/30/2016

Disability and Ideology

Dominant notions of ideology, insofar as they advance arguments according to which power suppresses truth and authenticity, assume what Foucault called a “juridico-discursive" conception of power whereby power is fundamentally repressive, generally operates from a centralized authority such as the state or a certain social institution or group, and reigns from the top down. One of Foucault’s aims in his later work was to articulate a conception of power to counter juridical conceptions of it; for, juridical conceptions of power, he maintained, fail to capture the most effective ways in which power operates. He wanted to show the shortcomings of the conception of power that, as he put it, still has not "cut off the head of the king.” In his work on disciplinary and normalizing force relations, Foucault showed that power is not merely repressive, but rather productive, operating most effectively when it puts in place the range of possible actions from which subjects may choose, guiding and coercing subjects who believe that they are autonomous and free, that their actions are self-motivated and deliberate. He argued, furthermore, that power ought to be conceived in terms of constitutive force relations that imbue phenomena such as sexuality, determinations of normality and abnormality, parenthood, pedagogy, etc. These phenomena, he argued, do not exist in domains apart from the operations of social power. Rather, relations of power are constitutive of these phenomena. Power will never be external to them. They cannot be freed from power.

Foucault notwithstanding, most philosophers believe that disability is indeed separate from power, that disability is a natural, objective human characteristic, rather than an apparatus of force relations which actually constitutes (naturalizes) disability as a prediscursive object that exists prior to relations of power. With respect to disability (among other things), most philosophers have in effect not yet cut off the head of the king, but rather are inclined to believe that disability, insofar as it is a natural human characteristic, by and large occupies a space outside the scope of what counts as “critical philosophy” and indeed is not really philosophically interesting. This pervasive belief, that is, the belief that disability is a naturally-occurring phenomenon that exists apart from force relations and, thus, is not suitable to philosophical discussions of social power creates a looping effect in philosophy inasmuch as it contributes to, expands, and sustains the naturalization of disability both within the discipline and beyond academia in policy and other spheres of social influence and organization.

Due to the pervasiveness within philosophy of the belief according to which disability is separate from social force relations, that is, because of the uncritical acceptance of this assumption in subfields across the discipline, most philosophers do not feel compelled to examine how their own theoretical, professional, institutional, and discursive practices reproduce the apparatus of disability, as an increasing number of them feel compelled, in an increasing number of ways, with respect gender, race, and other significant apparatuses. Nevertheless, the reluctance (or refusal) of most philosophers to reflect upon, let alone seriously entertain, how the apparatus of disability structures their own practices is intertwined with the continued exclusion of (previously-excluded) disabled philosophers from the profession and the persistent marginalization of philosophy of disability within the discipline. In short, until and unless (nondisabled) philosophers make substantial changes with respect to their own conceptual, institutional, discursive, and professional disciplinary practices, the profession will remain comprised almost exclusively of nondisabled philosophers and the position of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the content of the discipline will remain decidedly dismal.